This invention relates generally to online services, and in particular to measuring a user's interaction with content on an external domain, such as an advertisement, accessed from an online service.
Web browsers allow users to browse Internet web pages provided by remote web servers. Generally, each user's browser makes web page requests to the web servers, and in response the web servers obtain the requested web pages and serve those pages back to the user's web browser. The requests and responses often use Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP). A typical web page is written in a markup language, such as the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and includes a number of embedded objects referenced by respective Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) within the HTML. The HTML of the web page may include many embedded URLs that define other objects within the web page to be obtained by web browser. For example, graphics, images, flash applications, links to other web pages, advertisements, etc. may be defined by embedded URLs. As the web browser encounters objects such as embedded URLs, the web browser repeats the above sequence of processing for the web page in order to obtain each embedded object.
Online services providers often are interested in monitoring activities generated from their web pages. For example, when a user clicks a link embedded on the online services system's web page that takes the user outside of the online service provider's domain into a third party domain, the online services system may want to know how long is spent in the third party domain. There may be various reasons for the desired monitoring, and the online services system can adjust the pricing of, e.g., advertising links if the user behavior is monitored.
Conventional technologies for monitoring and measuring the user's interactions with third-party links and external domain interactions suffer from a variety of deficiencies. For example, conventional technologies require each third party content provider to provide the content, track access, and report to the online services service the results. This process raises two issue: reliability of information from the third party provider and amount of effort required. A third party may pay based on length of time that the user spent on the third party page, e.g., the third party may not pay for lengths shorter than a predetermined threshold. With the third party providing the reporting data, there is a potential for the third party provider to under-report user access to reduce their costs. In addition, the current model requires the third party content provider to provide the platform for the tracking, which requires additional effort and resources.
In addition, some monitoring is performed at the online services system's servers, which may be plural servers that are not necessarily in time synchronization. The difference between timers at different locations may not be an accurate reflection of the time spent away from the servers' domain.